Reviewed by Peter Veugelaers © 2005
- Words escape me ... ecstasy

  The previous movie Mike Nichols directed, What Planet are you From?, wasn’t vintage Nichols, but this is not new. Critics have compared his 1960s movie making hey day to the Orson Welles phenomena of making your best first with resurgences every so often. But the 2000 comedy involved fluffing with themes of personal sexual politics which foreshadow his latest resurgence, Closer, a movie with the edge of his 1970s relational drama Carnal Knowledge and the irony of Nichols’ Postcards from the Edge.

 When stripper Alice (Natalie Portman) meets Dan (Jude Law) in a twist of fate in a street accident they become lovers. One year passes when writer Dan meets Anna (Julia Roberts), a business minded photographer, who is married to sex-infatuated, intimacy starved Doctor Larry (Clive Owen). Through a bizarre but convincingly executed turn of events, Dan requites his love for independent Anna and Alice goes back to stripping, while Larry moves onto her strip club. The denouement is a statement on needy males victimising females and the void that is left from shattered hopes in love.

 Closer is based on the play by Brit Patrick Marber and contains plenty of unnatural but intensely revealing and often riveting dialogue about the characters. Marber admits in bbc.co.uk: “I’m well aware that the language of the play is not really how people speak. It’s heightened and - dare I say it - poetic in places.”

 Nichols directs from theatrical material seamlessly and believably: choice of shots, location, framing, and editing are just right to keep proceedings involving and emotionally charged, an intensely felt experience, albeit is less angry than the play version according to Marber. The movie is enhanced by all round great performances in complex characters, especially Clive Owen’s Larry who squeezes enough primitive angry resonance to paradoxically sympathetic and negative effect, and Natalie Portman and Jude Law have moments of the same.

 Choc full of thematic preoccupations about superficiality, art, technology, and intimacy, including explicitly formed ironic commentary on internet sex chats and strip bar lounges, there are some fine touches and ironies that accentuate theme. One sequence at a photographic exhibition is especially revealing as it probes the depth of the lead characters’ lives in spite of their socio-economic status. One subtle touch at the end of this sequence, coupled with the movie’s humanity and love for its characters, Closer provides a compelling insight into shallowness and the search for identity and intimacy in relationships, ending memorably.